pak

37 ms·

271.
by pak 15y ago
Wow. I was wondering how the hell TickTick.sh "extended" the bash interpreter grammar, because there is no obvious way to do that. The key is on lines 171-189: awk -F '``' '{\ # ... jibbery awk-ese ... }' `caller
272.
by pak 15y ago
What he means by "evolution at the cellular level" is that every cell in your body normally performs a delicate dance of differentiation, replication, and death to keep all your organ systems operational--this is why skin and bone heal afte
273.
by pak 15y ago
That was a fascinating read, although I must play devil's advocate and ask what prevents a ground crew from taking over a commercial airliner remotely in case of distress? None of what this flight crew did necessitated their physical prese
274.
by pak 15y ago
"Move fast and break stuff" is a philosophy that is simply not compatible with "Your privacy is very important to us" ( http://www.facebook.com/legal/terms ) and "We take safety issues very seriously, especially with children" ( http://www.
275.
by pak 15y ago
For anybody that needs a quick and humorous guide to all the terrible tropes of Business Guy Language, check out http://unsuck-it.com/browse/ (warning, some bits may be NSFW). An indispensable dictionary for the common man.
276.
by pak 15y ago
Many cities (in the U.S. at least) have a metropolitan center that is almost completely flat. San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and Seattle are the most obvious exceptions, but as far as I can remember, almost all the other cities toward the top
277.
by pak 15y ago
I think cars are successful for more complicated reasons than that, such as the physical and sociopolitical infrastructure invested in them, and advertising and culture. I can't speak for anywhere but the northeast US, but within every met
278.
by pak 15y ago
I was wondering this myself. I think that they were still tiling little metal blocks, according to this picture: http://www.datadeluge.com/2010/09/how-maths-was-typeset-befo... Which makes it all the more impressive--each page took consi
279.
by pak 15y ago
Weather is usually less problematic than you'd think for short rides in most temperate climate cities. It's only raining or snowing hard a small fraction of the time. Even with snow, once the roads are plowed you can bike with caution.
280.
by pak 15y ago
I'd get a cheapo used bike and lock it at the station. Bike racks/poles are everywhere; personally, I think people carrying their Inspector Gadget $2000 foldabikes on the train are overestimating the utility of taking the same bike everywh
281.
by pak 15y ago
The thing I noticed (sorry, LaTeX fan here) was how well they could typeset math and Latin all the way back in 1869! I have to say I'm impressed, and it makes me a bit sad that most of my college exams looked worse (typographically) than a
282.
by pak 15y ago
Lots of people can put things on URLs under princeton.edu, or the domains of most universities. In this case, note the ~username in the URL--this is the personal page of a graduate student. Usually universities do not censor pages of thei
283.
by pak 15y ago
Any program can be called a "one liner" if you just strip newlines and don't limit the line length.
284.
by pak 15y ago
In bash? Good luck. Your main problem is that by creating two FIFO's per plugin daemon in your design, any long-running request in a plugin will hold up other requests to that plugin. Unless you go ahead and implement an async I/O stack
285.
by pak 15y ago
Brother already does this. When the printer tells you that toner is empty on a Brother laser printer, you usually have about 15-20% left. However, the printer will refuse to print anything. The solution is (no joke) to put tape over the
286.
by pak 15y ago
Then you probably aren't on Hacker News that often. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3271572
287.
by pak 15y ago
Nope, but I would doubt that it could produce as much sunlight as if there were no roof. Even if the system were 100% efficient, if we assume that the rays from the sun are roughly parallel, you'd need as much solar dish area as the square
288.
by pak 15y ago
Oh boy. As a worker in a building that insisted on putting trees and large plants where they don't belong, like 9 stories above ground or wedged into tight covered courtyards, this is plan for disaster. The artificial light-catching equip
289.
by pak 15y ago
You know what's incredibly creepy? 3000 faceless people in Palo Alto know more about your distant friends than you will ever know. Depending on how much time you spend on the site, they probably also have profiled a sizable portion of your
290.
by pak 15y ago
FWIW, I don't think any publisher that uses an actual printing press uses Word to typeset books, simply because they almost certainly use the whole Adobe toolchain for prepress [1], and InDesign integrates much more nicely with this process
291.
by pak 15y ago
Hmm, I had no need for the programming additions in LuaTeX; my main concern was using UTF-8 and having better integration between LaTeX and my system fonts. XeLaTeX offers a great out-of-the-box experience for using commercial, "pro" fonts
292.
by pak 15y ago
If they are subcontracting the ebook dev process to a third party, perhaps not. And also, the whole editing to typesetting process is probably a hellish mix of Word and InDesign files, which leaves no "pristine copy" to pick the structured
293.
by pak 15y ago
I'm with you; I think ebooks should be distributed in some variant of XeLaTeX and rendered using its toolchain. You retain the structure and can change the size of the text, font, etc. as the user desires. It would be leaps and bounds bet
294.
by pak 15y ago
You made a great point, indirectly; a lot of the confusion from the original line of code is the crappy naming of the variables. They should have thrown in sta and stat to really amp up the Scrabble-like atmosphere. Once you clearly di
295.
by pak 15y ago
> arbitrarily pick a class of data that's "at least as extreme" as what was actually seen You are absolutely correct, in my haste to explain one misinterpretation of p-values, I stumbled into another gross oversimplification. The corre
296.
by pak 15y ago
"...a certainty of three sigma, so there’s about one chance in 100 the result is a fluke." This is a very incorrect way of summarizing the result. When will popsci writers ever get this right? Hypothesis testing cannot tell you the proba
297.
by pak 15y ago
And Ticonderoga-class warships... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Yorktown_(CG-48)
298.
by pak 15y ago
So in answer to your question, we already have the physical and legal infrastructure to support general-purpose automated cars, and we have the technological capacity. That is such a stretch from the four sentences before it. You are dis
299.
by pak 15y ago
Cars can currently drive themselves in certain limited environments tracks at specially designated competitions. How long do you think it will be before the country has the physical and legal infrastructure to support general-purpose autom
300.
by pak 15y ago
Please: there ought to be a rule on HN that instead of linking to a popsci re-interpretation of a scientific result, you instead link directly to the paper. http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/3/108/108ra113.full If it is behind a paywall,

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